Legal Platform · 2026
Strafwetboek 2026
Belgium’s new Criminal Code, in force since 1 September 2026, as a living dataset: 741 articles you can search, compare with the 1867 code and question, with every amendment kept as a readable diff.
Why it exists
On 1 September 2026 Belgium replaced its Criminal Code of 1867. The official database, Justel, only ever shows the current text; what changed between two versions is left to whoever has the patience to lay printouts side by side. We wanted the opposite: every article as one record with a stable number, regenerated at every amendment, so that the history of Belgian criminal law becomes something you can read.
What it does
Browse all 741 articles of Book I, Book II and the law on the security measure, search them by word or number, and see every offence sorted into the eight new penalty levels in one atlas. Compare the old 1867 articles with the ones that replaced them: for each of the 884 old articles the mapping names its successor with an honest certainty score, and anything below the threshold is marked as still to be checked. Ask a question and get an answer with the exact articles beside it, or practise with cases.
Nothing runs on a laptop. A push to the repository parses the source, validates it, commits the JSON and reloads the database; the site reads from there.
Trust, earned slowly
This is a tool, not the law, and the site says so on every page. Its text was compared article by article with Justel on 17 September 2026 and all 741 matched; a reporting form lets a reader flag anything that looks off. When a repair law turned out to be missing from the source, the site said so in a notice instead of quietly fixing it. Lawyers noticed: the Ghent Bar shared the site with its members and is adding it to its website.
The diff of Belgian criminal law, finally readable.